New ways of depicting hominids.
Depictions of extinct human ancestors and cousins are often more art than science.
Take, for example, two reconstructions of the Taung child, a 2.8-million-year-old
Australopithecus africanus skull discovered in South Africa in 1924. One version, made using a sculptor’s intuition, appears more apelike. A second version, made while working alongside a scientist, appears more humanlike.
Now, the researchers that produced the dueling images are attempting to remove some of this subjectivity by introducing standards that may give more accurate and reproducible portraits of species known only from fossilized bone. The team points out some of the flaws in
facial reconstructions of ancient hominids — and the social and ethical implications misleading portraits may have — in a report published February 26 in
Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
These two reconstructions of the Taung child depend on subjective decisions to make it appear more apelike (left) or humanlike (right).G. VINAS, R.M. CAMPBELL, M. HENNEBERG AND R. DIOGO
Getting the depictions right matters, says Rui Diogo, a biological anthropologist at Howard University in Washington, D.C. When museumgoers see artists’ renditions of Neandertals or extinct hominids, visitors often don’t realize how much bias creeps into the work. “They think it is reality,” he says. And that can skew people’s views and reinforce existing prejudices of present-day people.
For instance,
reconstructions of multiple extinct hominids in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., portray skin getting lighter and lighter in color as species became more and more bipedal. “But there is zero evidence to say the skin was whiter,” Diogo says. Such a depiction might give the mistaken impression that people with lighter skin are more evolved.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-hominids-reconstruction-extinct-human-evolution-taung
